Question

Unchecked exceptions are alright if you want to handle every failure the same way, for example by logging it and skipping to the next request, displaying a message to the user and handling the next event, etc. If this is my use case, all I have to do is catch some general exception type at a high level in my system, and handle everything the same way.

But I want to recover from specific problems, and I’m not sure the best way to approach it with unchecked exceptions. Here is a concrete example.

Suppose I have a web application, built using Struts2 and Hibernate. If an exception bubbles up to my ‘action’, I log it, and display a pretty apology to the user. But one of the functions of my web application is creating new user accounts, that require a unique user name. If a user picks a name that already exists, Hibernate throws an org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException (an unchecked exception) down in the guts of my system. I’d really like to recover from this particular problem by asking the user to choose another user name, rather than giving them the same ‘we logged your problem but for now you’re hosed’ message.

Here are a few points to consider:

1. There a lot of people creating accounts simultaneously. I don’t want to lock the whole user table between a ‘SELECT’ to see if the name exists and an ‘INSERT’ if it doesn’t. In the case of relational databases, there might be some tricks to work around this, but what I’m really interested in is the general case where pre-checking for an exception won’t work because of a fundamental race condition. Same thing could apply to looking for a file on the file system, etc.
2. Given my CTO’s propensity for drive-by management induced by reading technology columns in ‘Inc.’, I need a layer of indirection around the persistence mechanism so that I can throw out Hibernate and use Kodo, or whatever, without changing anything except the lowest layer of persistence code. As a matter of fact, there are several such layers of abstraction in my system. How can I prevent them from leaking in spite of unchecked exceptions?
3. One of the declaimed weaknesses of checked exceptions is having to ‘handle’ them in every call on the stack—either by declaring that a calling method throws them, or by catching them and handling them. Handling them often means wrapping them in another checked exception of a type appropriate to the level of abstraction. So, for example, in checked-exception land, a file-system–based implementation of my UserRegistry might catch IOException, while a database implementation would catch SQLException, but both would throw a UserNotFoundException that hides the underlying implementation. How do I take advantage of unchecked exceptions, sparing myself of the burden of this wrapping at each layer, without leaking implementation details?

Answer 1

IMO, wrapping exceptions (checked or otherwise) has several benefits that are worth the cost:

1) It encourages you to think about the failure modes for the code you write. Basically, you have to consider the exceptions that the code you call may throw, and in turn you’ll consider the exceptions you’ll throw for the code that calls yours.

2) It gives you the opportunity to add additional debugging information into the exception chain. For instance, if you have a method that throws an exception on a duplicate username, you might wrap that exception with one that includes additional information about the circumstances of the failure (for example, the IP of the request that provided the dupe username) that wasn’t available to the lower-level code. The cookie trail of exceptions may help you debug a complex problem (it certainly has for me).

3) It lets you become implementation-independent from the lower level code. If you’re wrapping exceptions and need to swap out Hibernate for some other ORM, you only have to change your Hibernate-handling code. All the other layers of code will still be successfully using the wrapped exceptions and will interpret them in the same way, even though the underlying circumstances have changed. Note that this applies even if Hibernate changes in some way (ex: they switch exceptions in a new version); it’s not just for wholesale technology replacement.

4) It encourages you use different classes of exceptions to represent different situations. For example, you may have a DuplicateUsernameException when the user tries to reuse a username, and a DatabaseFailureException when you can’t check for dupe usernames due to a broken DB connection. This, in turn, lets you answer your question (‘how do I recover?’) in flexible and powerful ways. If you get a DuplicateUsernameException, you may decide to suggest a different username to the user. If you get a DatabaseFailureException, you may let it bubble up to the point where it displays a ‘down for maintenance’ page to the user and send off a notification email to you. Once you have custom exceptions, you have customizeable responses — and that’s a good thing.